"I will not say that you are speaking falsely, but I think you know you are setting out only a little part of the truth. Admit it, Honora."
Honora sighed heavily.
"Oh, yes," she said at length, "I do admit it. You must forgive me, Kate. It seems so easy for you two to be happy that I can't help feeling it blasphemous for you to be anything else. If it were an ordinary marriage or an ordinary separation, I shouldn't feel so agonized over it. But you and Karl--such mates--the only free spirits I know! How you would love! It would be epic. And I should rejoice that you were living in that savage world instead of in a city. You two would need room--like great beautiful buildings. Who would wish to see you in the jumble of a city? With you to aid him, Karl may become a distinguished man. Your lives would go on together, widening, widening--"
"Oh!" interrupted Kate with a sharp ejaculation; "we'll not talk of it any more, Honora. You must not think because I cannot marry him that he will always be unhappy. In time he will find another woman--"
"Kate! Will you find another man?"
"You know I shall not! After Wander? Any man would be an anticlimax to me after him."
"Can you suspect him of a passion or a fealty less than your own? If you refuse to marry him, I believe you will frustrate a great purpose of Nature. Why, Kate, it will be a crime against Love. The thought as I feel it means more--oh, infinitely more--than I can make the words convey to you; but you must think them over, Kate,--I beg you to think them over!"
In the darkness, Kate heard Honora stealing away to her room.
So she was alone, and the hour had come for her decision.
"'Bitter, alas,'" she quoted to the rising trouble of the sea, '"the sorrow of lonely women.'" The distillation of that strange duplex soul, Fiona Macleod, was as a drop of poisoned truth upon her parched tongue.